it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs
and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind
was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of
wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a
track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously
between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old
lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her
bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes
had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a
new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed
on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted
everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country,
these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.

"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a
voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up
to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed
a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind
without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was
glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the
hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at
his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her
velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler
that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big
for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of
large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of
flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort
of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the
slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she
would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music
heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of
his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the
whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the
range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would
tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine
what manner of place it would be--whether there would be grass or
heather underfoo